Album Review: Arctic Flowers

Weaver (Deranged)

[DARK PUNK] Punks have never been as immune to pandemics
as they’d like to think. So it’s not surprising that the past few years
of black-metal shoegazing and other such trends have seen the reanimated
corpuses of goth and death rock bleeding into the punk scene. Arctic
Flowers, a beacon in this new gloom since 2009, has so far avoided
succumbing to the gray sameness of its cohorts with a wily aesthetic as
indebted to classic anarcho-punk agitations as it is to 45
Grave-robbing. Although the Portland quartet’s dour new LP is short on
the sort of chant-along stretches that made 2011’s Reveries such a cherishable anomaly, Weaver
is by no means a rote pledge of allegiance to de rigueur dark lords.
Singer Alex Caroccio summons familiar but discomfiting goth visions, her
clean, wintry croon bringing “sullen chests” and “strange loops locked”
and “hollow skin” to brittle life. While the band is willing to give
her a bed of retro flange to fall back on, the funereal vibe is
constantly teased and subverted by a riotous devotion to punk’s rousing
past. It reveals a subtly unnerving truth more vital and lasting than
anything on Reveries: The black rest that eventually claims us all may not be as peaceful as previously believed.